Time for your daily helping

I went on a family vacation that included two of my grandchildren. Spending time with them got me thinking how important it is that Social Security be there for their generation. So I looked at the trustees’ annual report and, sure enough, on Page 163, I found the numbers I was looking for. They showed that the Treasury has had to borrow more than $200 billion from investors over the past three years to keep Social Security’s retirement and disability checks from bouncing.

Like I said, a piping hot mountain. I presume that this clown is referring to the so-called “national debt,” which has nothing to do with the “sustainability” of Social Security. These bastards never stop lying. Notice how he claims to have found “evidence” to justify his bias.

The report doesn’t say this outright. In fact, if you do a superficial read, it looks like the system is doing better than ever, because its trust fund — its supposed reserve to meet future shortfalls — is the biggest it’s ever been.

There is no “trust fund.” In order to pay Social Security benefits to you, the U.S. government simply instructs your bank to change the numbers in your account, thereby creating money out of thin air. SS benefits do not come from taxes or China or bankers or investors.

The key to understanding why Social Security is in financial trouble today — not when its alleged trust fund runs dry in 2030-something, but today — is that the interest the trust fund collects on its holdings doesn’t help the government cover the cost of the benefits it shells out.

That’s because the trust fund’s only assets are Treasury securities. And the Treasury pays interest on those — $93 billion last year, $294 billion over the past three years — by giving the fund Treasury securities, not cash.

He’s saying that the mythical “trust fund” is the money that investors (including the U.S. government itself) have deposited in Federal Reserve savings accounts. Nonsense. He also says that the interest paid on T-securities is not money, but more T-securities!

There’s a lot more excrement in his post, but that’s all that I can stomach for one day.